Jen Jovan Art Musings and Random Thoughts

Doing Nothing is Something

8/31/2020

"A Lazy Day is Really Hard Work" and "Doing Nothing is Something", mixed media on cradled wood, each 8 x 11 x .75. Ready to hang. Available here and at Artfinder.

Try to spend a day doing nothing; we call that a lazy day. Although for many of us who are used to running around from this to that, a lazy day is actually very hard work! It's not so easy to just be. If you can be happy, relaxed and smiling when you're not doing something, you're quite strong. Doing nothing brings about quality of being, which is very important. So doing nothing is actually something. Please write that down and display it in your home: Doing nothing is something.

- THICH NHAT HANH, Your True Home

That crafty universe dropped this passage in my lap just as I finished having a very lazy day. Or, I thought it was lazy. But doing nothing is doing something, so maybe I was not lazy after all?

A Lazy Day is Really Hard Work

Doing Nothing is Something

Doing nothing is necessary, productive work. It can even be hard work, if you're used to being very busy, or if you feel guilty when you're enjoying a box of bonbons and pajamas and Netflix.

I wonder what would happen if we felt guilty for NOT being lazy? Hmmmmm. That's going to require a bit of thinking while doing nothing else. But wait! Thinking is doing something so....oh my. Now I've twisted my thoughts into a knot.

About the art - acrylic over an underpainting of leftover paint. Gelli-plate printed collage materials and oil pastels on top. Finished with a background layer of acrylic mixed with gesso. Liberally sprinkled with love and good mojo.

6 Comments

Dotty Seiter link

8/31/2020 10:40:12 am

JEN: those expressive faces! You are masterful. And the red hair!

Because your art and a delicious poem landed in my inbox on the same morning, I just have to share the following words from poet Henry Taylor.

Art and Life

In the Portland Museum of Art’s snack bar
one July morning, a young woman worked
at the board that lists the specials of the day.
From her little stepladder she leaned in

with various colored chalks, using both point
and edge, adjusting with her fingertips,
experimenting with size and color, print
and script, once or twice stepping down and back,

then homing in on what was to be solved.
The whole thing might have taken her ten minutes.
At last she moved a little farther back
to see how what she’d done had changed the room,

while we, who had the good luck to be there
at the beginning of her day, beheld
the change she couldn’t know that she had wrought
merely by how her red hair caught the light.

jen

8/31/2020 10:55:08 am

Dotty! OMG! What a perfect poem! I have been in that snack bar...I have seen that board. That last line...perfection. xoxoxo

Carl Stoveland

8/31/2020 11:57:08 pm

The simple act if being and quieting your mind. Can be achieved thru reading and even a type of netflixing with the right content not too deep but just enough to get you away from everyday. For me it British crime shows. There is a magic space in doing nothing if you can be open to it where the muse does the heavy lifting and plants the seeds of ideas that can only take hold when your focus is neither near nor far. Let the muse in. Take the time for yourself. I will have the perfect opportunity being one of two people on a tropical island with all my art gear for a month. I can dive headlong into my work or not. Maybe just one more chapter in this book before I swim on the reef with fish and film them doing their thing. I’ll have 30 days do all in good time.

9/1/2020 10:36:36 am

Carl! Thank you for your thoughts on the eve of your departure for a month of being unplugged! I can hardly wait to hear what happens when the noise of the world falls away and all that's left is fishes and ocean waves...

Carol Edan link

9/1/2020 12:37:08 am

What a beautiful poem Dotty sent! Yes, I think just doing nothing is probably the hardest to do. Even when we think we are doing nothing we are doing something, even if it's thought that we should be doing something! Now that a mixed up thought! As long as we breathe something is going on.
Love your spicy girls, now they are into something!

9/1/2020 10:37:48 am

Carol! That poem - WOOT! And it is a mixed up thought trail about nothing and something...which is...something. Ha ha! Thank you - spicy girls! I like that. :)

Doing Nothing is Something

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